Land division in the Old Babylonian period

[Old Babylonian cuneiform]. Cuneiform tablet on arable land division.

€ 8,500.00

A document concerning arable land belonging to a temple or a palace, describing its division into plots assigned to named individuals. It is dated to the Third Day of the Third Month, equivalent to May or June. The year is unidentified, but probably sometime in the Isin-Larsa period (c. 2000-1700 BCE), which spanned the end of Sumerian power with Third Dynasty of Ur and the birth of the First Babylonian Empire under the dynasty of Hammurabi (c. 1810-1750 BCE).

The text is written on the obverse, reverse, and upper edge. It lists two groups of people, one of six and one of eight men, among whom the land was divided, subject to the administration of the officials Lu-Ninhursag, Sîn-magir, Sîn-iddinam and Sallilum.

The Sumerian city-states of early Mesopotamia were conquered by Sargon the Great in the 24th and 23rd centuries BCE, leading to the creation of the Akkadian Empire. Following its fall in the 22nd century, Sumerian power was revived under the Third Dynasty of Ur before that too gave way to Babylonian conquests by Hammurabi and others.

Cuneiform writing developed in Sumer, nowadays southern Iraq, around the year 2900 BCE out of earlier pictograms. Over time, the pictograms had become more abstracted and wedge-like and took on the value of a syllable which could be used to form words, creating the first proper writing system in human history.

Beyond its initial use in Sumerian, Cuneiform came to be used to write several other languages, such as Akkadian, Elamite and Hittite. It was used to record the Epic of Gilgamesh as well as myths such as that of the Flood, but most documents are administrative records, as this tablet is.

This artefact is documented as in private collections since at least the 1980s, when it was examined by Prof. W. G. Lambert, Professor of Assyriology at the University of Birmingham and Fellow of the British Academy, a copy of whose report on the object is included.

A document of Mesopotamian society at a time of crucial transition between Neo-Sumerian power and the rise of Babylon.